Redeem Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2!

Lords of Shadow, released in 2010, was by all means a critical success. Four years later, its sequel drops and flops. Same team, same people. What happened? Anonymous reports allege that MercurySteam Studio Director and Writer, Enric Álvarez, is to blame. Positive reception for LoS1 had apparently bloated the Director’s ego to the point of visionary constraint - no one but him had any input on the creative and design decisions of LoS2. Internally, the studio essentially collapsed and the game went with it.

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We’re all well-acquainted with the fallout following the release of Team Bondi’s L.A. Noire. There too a studio head had mangled the creativity of developers and, though the game was received well, the same can't be said for McNamara’s management. Near constant turnover and crunch time had entirely decimated the studio’s reserve of talent.

The problems therein with overbearing directors become especially amplified when the visionary of the project is unable to inform all departments to the completion of that creative vision. A cursory glance at the art direction of Lords of Shadow 2, for example, shows that whatever turnover there was at MercurySteam, it ultimately couldn’t be controlled and focused. The game in places just looks plain ridiculous because of artist turnover; poorly-scaled worlds and little cohesion between areas.

We often lay blame to entire studios or publishers when a problem product or practice in the industry arises. Sometimes we have enough information to target a smaller group or even just an individual. And, while Álvarez’s domineering is still only alleged to have occurred and contributed to the poor performance of LoS2, studio unrest is something that we can address more generally here and something that MercurySteam and Konami can (and should!) look into.